Do movies need a pitch clock?

No, but hear me out

Baseball and movies have the same problem: They’ve fallen from their shared perch atop American culture. First, other sports and TV came for their respective crowns. Now it’s streaming and convenience culture that have devalued the slow, gentle rhythms of America’s dual national pastimes. Each industry has responded in divergent ways. Baseball, as you might have heard, is doing everything possible to make their games shorter. Movies are undoubtedly getting longer.

The first time I noticed the change was in 2019, when Avengers: Endgame clocked in at three hours and two minutes. That was long for a superhero movie, and it still is. But not that long. Superhero movies are routinely over two hours now. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Shazam: Fury of the Gods, Quantumania all crossed the two hour mark. In this particular genre, the length is easy to explain. There’s a lot of bullshit to get through in a superhero movie—exposition about gems and realms and stuff—and the rabid fans who eagerly build their lives around these films are very happy to wade through it. 

But wait a minute: Arthouse movies are getting longer, too. Ari Aster’s Beau is Afraid and Damien Chazelle’s Babylon both crossed three hours, and did so by pumping their runtimes full of as much surreal, grisly, and unpleasant material as possible. The films of Martin Scorsese, our greatest living filmmaker, have grown to shocking lengths over the last decade. Wolf of Wall Street was three hours long. Silence ran 2:45. The Irishman was 3:29. His newest film Killers of the Flower Moon, which just premiered at Cannes, is 3:26. Finally, Christopher Nolan recently announced that his eagerly-awaited Oppenheimer will be his longest film yet, “kissing three hours” he said, trying apparently to make a potential bladder issue seem romantic.

Let me make this perfectly clear. In principle, there’s nothing wrong with a long movie. A movie should be as long as it needs to be. Shoah needed to be nine hours. Before Sunset needed to be 80 minutes. But just as a movie gets the length it deserves, so too does an era of filmmaking get the length it deserves, which raises the two questions: Why are movies so darn long, and do we deserve this?

There are two ways to explain it. The first is that making a movie long “eventizes” it (a truly horrible word to describe cinema, but that’s what it is). People need extra motivation to go to theaters these days, when they have ample entertainment options at home. A bloated runtime for a superhero movie symbolizes epicness to the average fan, many of whom grew up on video games, which are judged in part by the quantity of gameplay they contain. One retailer lists “costs per hour” in their marketing materials for video games, and I wouldn’t be surprised if movie theaters start doing the same. 

For the cinephile, however, the news of a long run time creates a similar sense of anticipation. Most folks who love film will go see the new Martin Scorsese movie regardless, but I wonder if there are certain in-betweeners (people who love movies but don’t necessarily identify as cinephiles) who sees news of a three-hour Ari Aster movie or an even longer Martin Scorsese movies and think to themselves, “Now there’s something worth leaving the house for.” I get this. A three-hour art film is hard to watch at home. There are ample distractions: pets, doorbells, snacks, and, of course, your phone. A three-hour drama, especially a bizarre, reality-bending one like Beau is Afraid, requires the immersive space of the cinema to experience correctly.

The irony of all this—and the second reason that movies are long these days—is that the final resting place for these films is on streaming, another space where success is measured in quantity, not quality. Netflix and their colleagues brag about how many hours of content their users watched. That’s actually a number they use in their quarterly reports. So a long film benefits their bottom line. In a sense, it’s no different than a series which, after a successful first season that was binge-watched by millions, gets an order for another few seasons, whether or not there is more story to be told. They’ll be happy to make it for as long as they can.

The long movie is the result of a strange confluence of streaming and theatrical exigencies. They benefit theaters by luring cinephiles and almost-cinephiles out of their comfortable living rooms (it’s hard to overstate how much of a change this is from the previous arrangement, in which long movies were discouraged because they reduced the number of showtimes in a day). For streaming, there’s really no benefit at all to a tight 90-minute movie. No benefit, that is, except the art itself, as many streaming films would benefit from a few cuts.

To be perfectly honest, it’s a bit hard for me to go into further detail on this topic, since I haven’t Killers of the Flower Moon, and I would have probably despised Beau is Afraid at any length (although the first forty minutes were pretty good). I also thought Endgame was terrific, but as the conclusion of an epic, 20-movie saga, the swollen runtime felt appropriate. I suppose this is another way of saying that the length itself is by no means an indicator of a film’s quality.

But Scorsese is an interesting case. He is in a place few filmmakers have found themselves. He’s near the end of a long, celebrated career, but instead of fighting to remain relevant to financiers, he is getting money thrown at him to do whatever he wants. Netflix and Apple have backed his two most recent films, using his cachet as a shortcut to prestige. In turn, Scorsese takes all their money and makes films of epic length. Cinephiles celebrate this on principle, which makes me wonder if they’re able to retain their critical faculties over it. 

The results seem mixed to me on the long arthouse film. Babylon was a mess, and Beau is Afraid meandered with purpose, but it still meandered. The last hour of The Irishman is some of Scorsese’s best work, a bleakly honest portrayal of life’s end and a cutting critique of the postwar American male, but the first 90 minutes are poorly-conceived, with distracting de-aging effects and numerous scenes that add little in way of plot, theme, or sensation. It’s a story he could have told better in two and half hours (or less), but he was allowed to do more, so he did.

If you give a hitter in baseball the ability to step out of the batter’s box after every pitch, readjust their batting gloves, and think about their strategy, they’ll do it. When Scorsese was asked recently at Cannes about the lengthy runtime of Killers, he explained, “The more I found out, the more I wanted to put in.” Scorsese has certainly (repeatedly) earned the benefit of the doubt. But simply putting more plot, more characters, more ideas into a film because you find them interesting doesn’t seem like a great strategy. I gravitate toward films in which every frame is thoughtfully considered, and those that don’t contribute to a larger point, story, or visual motif are excised. Constraints are good. Limitations force filmmakers to think hard about what type of story they are telling, and why. More than anyone, Scorsese should be allowed to make whatever movie he wants, and I’ll never complain about him getting the same budgets that Marvel and DC routinely hand out. The jury is still out, however, on whether that approach yields better art.